GitLab, First Impressions

Today, at work, we set-up the Community Edition of GitLab. It took a while to get it set-up, but this was mainly due to complications of installing a hosted service on a corporate network — the actual GitLab installation only took a couple of minutes and was really very simple.

We installed the service on a virtual machine running Ubuntu 14.04 and the provided deb package did all the work, the only thing I had to do was to configure the hostname. If I was rating the installation experience, I would probably give it 9 out of 10. The only reason I wouldn’t give it 10 is because there was a slight issue with the provided Ubuntu repository, which meant that I had to manually download the deb file and use the dpkg command to perform the install. Other than that, the installation was flawless, which is quite remarkable given the dependencies involved.

Regarding the web interface and administration, I’ve only just started using it, but it looks and feels like a quality product. Anyone familiar with GitHub should feel instantly at home when using it, I know I did. Also, something that struck me straight away was just how helpful it is. There is lots of guidance throughout and it’s all written in plain English (switch English for your preferred language, as I assume it features localisation). A nice touch.

There is not much else to report at the moment, but if you’re interested in GitLab, I would highly recommend giving it a try. Having a local GitHub-esque service with free private repositories is a definite win.